1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method for processing a sports video and apparatus thereof, and more particularly, to a method for summarizing the sports video through adaptively assigning a segment length of an event in the sports video.
2. Description of the Prior Art
With rapid development in digital television systems, video entertainment products have become essential in daily life, therefore more and more entertainment videos are being generated. However, sometimes different types of video content may take longer for viewers to fully enjoy it. For example, a baseball game normally takes at least two hours or even longer. The baseball game video content has a plurality of events performed by two baseball teams. A viewer may only want to enjoy some of the desired events from the whole baseball game video, instead of viewing the entire game. Therefore, in order to meet user requirements in this capacity, some tools have been developed for processing baseball game videos to generate a summarized video version.
According to the prior art, one of the conventional methods is to directly detect events that are important for the baseball game video according to a predetermined definition of an event. The event may represent an exciting event during the baseball game. For example, the event may be a one-base hit, two-base hit, three-base hit, home run hit, base on ball, fielding, and go ahead run, etc, during the base ball game. In prior art, only a predetermined time interval will be assigned to each of the video segment that corresponds to the event categorization, which are the one-base hit, two-base hit, three-base hit, home run hit, base on ball, fielding, and go ahead run. For brevity, the following conventional method only extracts the video segment corresponding to the home run scene. According to prior art, the time interval assigned to the video segment corresponding to the home run scene is a fixed time interval. In other words, whenever a home run scene is detected by the conventional method, the extracted video segment of the home run scene is of a fixed length, even if the home run scene may be unusually long. Also, the prior art method ignores potentially exciting actions that may have occurred immediately before the home run. For example, if a batter hits a home run, then the viewer may want to enjoy the entire home run, including some of the batter movements prior to the home run. For example, some of the viewers may enjoy seeing the batter warming up and doing practice swings prior to the home run. However, the conventional method only extracts the home run scene where the batter contacts the ball and runs toward the home base afterwards. Then, the summarized video version is generated through the conventional method, in which all of the exciting scenes in the baseball game are corresponding to the predetermined time interval. Furthermore, according to the prior art, another conventional method is just to set the exciting scenes by an average time interval, in which the average time interval is obtained by divided the total length of the summarized video by the total number of the exciting scenes. Similar to the first conventional method, all of the exciting scenes are also corresponding to the same time interval. Therefore, the prior art summarizing tools may not satisfy all viewers.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,931,595 discloses a method for automatic extraction of semantically significant events from a video. In this prior art invention, the method determines the boundary of a slow motion replay for an event in a video, which includes determining a statistical measure of different portions of the video. The video may include the event and the slow motion replay of the event. This method utilizes the statistical measure to determine the boundary of the slow motion replay of the event. Accordingly, when the boundary of the slow motion replays of the event are detected, they may be used as representative of semantically important events of the video and subsequent summarization of the video content.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,028,325 discloses a method for annotating programs for automatic summary generation. According to this prior art, audio/video programming content is made available to a receiver from a content provider, and a meta data is made available to the receiver from a meta data provider. The meta data corresponds to the programming content, and identifies, for each of multiple portions of the programming content, an indicator of a likelihood that the portion is an exciting portion of the content. In one implementation of this prior art, the meta data includes probabilities that segments of a baseball program are exciting, and is generated by analyzing the audio data of the baseball program for both heightened speech and baseball hits. The meta data can then be used to generate a summary for the baseball program.